As anticipated, the first batch of Thunderbolt enabled motherboards have now been released, essentially opening up Thunderbolt technology to the PC market. Initially the Thunderbolt-certified motherboards will be [..]

Thunderbolt External Hard Drives at CES and Macworld 2012

After the recent CES and Macworld conventions, indications are that Thunderbolt technology is starting to take hold. A number of new products were introduced like the Elgato Thunderbolt SSD hard drive, the first bus powered Thunderbolt hard drive and the Seagate GoFlex Thunderbolt adapter.

Western Digital displayed a prototype of their new My Book Thunderbolt Duo. The Duo has two 3.5 inch hard drives in either a 4TB (2 x 2TB) or 6TB (2 x 3TB) RAID 0 array. With two identical disks it would be ideal if there was support for RAID 1 (mirroring) also. This will be confirmed closer to the launch date.

It has two Thunderbolt ports so potentially up to six Thunderbolt devices can be daisy chained off each Thunderbolt port. That’s a lot of storage space if you daisy chain a few 6TB My Books together. They won’t run at Thunderbolts max but the transfer speeds are still an impressive 2Gbps.

The My Book Thunderbolt Duo currently only supports Apple MAC hardware. Not surprising as only Apple have adopted Thunderbolt technology so far. No doubt Western Digital will be looking to change this though as PCs are due to be implemented with Thunderbolt ports later this year.

Another SSD, OCZ’s Lightfoot is a small and light external SSD with a Thunderbolt port.

Designed to be a truly portable device, this little Thunderbolt external hard drive is ideal for carrying around. It is due to be available in 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB sizes.

With a Marvell controller and reported transfer speeds of up to 750 MB/s it could be a very useful bit of kit to have in your laptop bag.

Bear in mind though, it can’t be daisy chained as it only has the one Thunderbolt port.

It will be interesting to see what further developments materialise during the year with Thunderbolt Technology.